Google is prioritizing AI in its Google News redesign

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Google is redesigning the Google News app by prioritizing AI, the company announced at this week's Google I/O conference per a blog post. Rolling out worldwide next week on mobile devices, Google News will replace Google Play Newsstand on desktop and the Google News & Weather app on mobile.

BI Intelligence

The AI-driven overhaul achieves two fundamental end goals:

Simplifying users' news experience online. Machine-learning AI will deliver users a curated stream of top news stories — that is, the stories it thinks they'll be most interested in — further simplifying and condensing their news experience on a single app. Users can also "zoom out" to view the most widely read stories, outside of their personalized sorting.

Simplifying the publications subscription process. Google News will also integrate Subscribe with Google, which acts as a central hub for all of a user's various subscriptions to publications. Easing the subscription process through this hub could boost the number of news subscriptions consumers are willing to pay for. Further, users who buy a subscription in-app will also be able to access content on other platforms and devices — surprisingly, that wasn't available before.

The redesign follows a general trend among tech companies — chiefly Google, Apple, and Facebook — that are still trying to optimize for reliability for publishers whose content gets funneled through their platforms online. Google and Facebook contribute the majority of publishers' referral traffic, which together accounts for nearly 50% of publishers' overall revenues.

Up until recently, Facebook drove considerably more traffic to publisher sites. However, since Facebook changed its algorithm to deprioritize publisher content in News Feed in mid-2016, some publishers have seen traffic tank, and a few have shuttered operations. Meanwhile, Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) — which offers fast-loading publisher content — now sees the majority of referrals growth through Google News or Google Search, and sends more traffic to publishers' sites than Facebook, per recent Chartbeat data.

The Apple News app is also now rising as a source of referral traffic for publishers online, with some stories generating as much as half of their total traffic from Apple News, reports Business Insider. In the rush to drive user growth, engagement, and ad revenues, platforms are increasingly committing resources to being the most effective distributor of news, live video, and original video.